Bringing Belonging to the Table

Before we can build belonging, we have to name what it looks like. In this session, we’ll unpack how belonging shows up (or doesn’t) in your school or district and examine what’s already in the “potluck” of your culture. Objectives: Clarify your team’s current beliefs around belonging, identify barriers, and begin crafting a working definition that reflects your local context.

Belonging requires more than presence; it requires power. This session explores how leadership decisions, hiring practices, and meeting structures can unintentionally exclude certain voices. Objectives: Reflect on who holds influence in your school systems, assess gaps in representation, and identify strategies for bringing more authentic perspectives into decision-making.

Belonging lives in the daily interactions: morning greetings, hallway norms, discipline responses, and classroom culture. This session focuses on the small, replicable actions that build trust. Belonging requires more than presence; it requires power. This session explores how leadership decisions, hiring practices, and meeting structures can unintentionally exclude certain voices. Objectives: Reflect on who holds influence in your school systems, assess gaps in representation, and identify strategies for bringing more authentic perspectives into decision-making.

In this session, we’ll explore the Sense of Belonging Assessment Tool from the book. You’ll learn how to use it to gather meaningful feedback from students and staff, and how to respond to what you learn. Objectives: Understand the structure of the tool, explore sample data scenarios, and plan how your team will implement the assessment to drive real-time improvement.

What you build must outlast the momentum of a single initiative. In our final session, we’ll map out long-term strategies for embedding belonging into leadership practices, systems, and professional learning. Objectives: Craft a sustainability plan, align goals with your school or district vision, and identify key next steps and champions to carry the work forward.